Chrome’s Windows 8 Chrome OS-lookalike gets a stable release

Latest build also makes it easier to track down noisy tabs.

The latest stable version of Chrome—it's up to an astonishing version 32 now—brings with it perhaps one of the most useful features ever to make its way into a browser. I'm sure we've all suffered the infuriating situation where one of our browser's many tabs is making a noise. We then have to hunt through all the tabs in turn to find out which one is the culprit. That can be easy enough if it's a YouTube window, say, but not all noisy tabs are so easily detected, with ads being notorious audio offenders.

Chrome now has a trio of icons to help out. If a tab is making a noise, Chrome will put a little speaker in the tab itself. This gives instant, at-a-glance detection of noisy tabs. The other two icons are less important, but still useful. If one tab is accessing your webcam, it'll be adorned with a little red recording icon. A tab that's being cast to your TV with a Chromecast will show a little TV icon.

The noisy tab icon.

These icons have been a part of Chrome's developer builds for many months, and the speaker icon is really invaluable. It's a simple feature, but an absolutely welcome one.

Another feature making its way to the stable build is Chrome's Chrome OS-like Metro mode browser. When set as the default browser on Windows 8 and started up in Metro mode (using the icon on the Start screen or a link in a Metro app, rather than the icon one on the taskbar or a link on the desktop) the browser looks like Google's browser-based operating system. This mode starts a Chrome "desktop." Along the bottom of the screen is a taskbar of sorts, used for launching Web apps of your choosing. Populating the main area of the screen are one or more browser windows.

Though this is a stable version of Chrome, it introduces the beta of a feature called "supervised users." This, like the Chrome "desktop," is a Chrome OS-originated feature. Supervised users have their browsing history tracked and browsing permissions managed online. Supervised users can then be placed in a whitelist mode, where only approved sites are allowed, or a blacklist mode, where certain sites are blocked. They can also be forced to use SafeSearch for their Google searches.

Finally, the built-in malware blocker has become more prominent, making it harder to run known malicious files.